Judging "privileged" Jews : Holocaust ethics, representation, and the "Grey zone" / Adam Brown.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Nazis' persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to hold so-called "privileged" positions, and their behavior has often been judged as self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood, and often taboo aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi's concept of the "grey zone," this study analyzes the passing of moral judgment on "privileged" Jews as represented by writers, such as Raul Hilberg, and in films, including Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List . Negotiating the problems and potentialities of "representing the unrepresentable," this book engages with issues that are fundamental to present-day attempts to understand the Holocaust and deeply relevant to reflections on human nature.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Brown (Deakin Univ., Australia) deals in detail with the touchiest aspect of the Holocaust, so-called privileged Jews, and he does so with scholarly thoroughness. The "grey zone" has to do with Jews who themselves played a role in the Holocaust as functionaries in the ghettos and the camps, usually for food or other rewards. Besides the least-culpable "privileged," there were cooperators and collaborators: ghetto police, members of the Jewish councils, kapos, those who operated crematoria. But no matter the level, the end result for most of the "privileged" was the same: death. In his essay on the "grey zone" in The Drowned and the Saved (1988), Primo Levi set the standard for judgment: suspend it. Brown is neither for nor against judgment. His concern is how others assess guilt. He starts with Levi's essay and moves on to the work of Raul Hilberg and filmmakers Claude Lanzmann (Shoah), Steven Spielberg (Schindler's List), and Tim Blake Nelson (The Grey Zone), to name just a few. He concludes that no matter how one constructs the narrative of the "privileged" Jew--showing development from cooperation to redemption, or from aiding and abetting to resistance, or from collaboration to condemnation--no one dealing with the topic can avoid moral evaluation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. R. C. Conard University of Dayton